Last year at Fortune’s Brainstorm: Tech I watched News Corp. digital czar Jon Miller talk almost glowing of the new talent News Corp. was bringing into MySpace. It was just two months after the hiring of Facebook’s Owen Van Natta as CEO and without mentioning him by name, Miller appeared to lay out the case for why Van Natta was the man to lead MySpace forward:
“You can’t do everything and you can’t do it all yourself. You have to look outside in addition to within. You must be focused. We are focused on music, games and video. You can’t play catch-up. It requires a top-to-bottom (culture) shift. Part of the idea of bringing in the new team was to make this shift. We’re going to make a culture that is product focused, entrepreneurial and dedicated to continued innovation.”
However, maybe it was telling that Miller refereed to “them” as a team and not Van Natta as the lone savior. Because now, only 6 months later, Van Natta is out of a job and MySpace COO, Mike Jones, and chief product officer, Jason Hirschhorn (both handpicked for the “team” by Miller) appear to be at the helm of a still-teetering ship.
Kara Swisher of All Things Digital (a News Corp owned publication)reports that contrary to public statements, Miller fired Van Natta after all day meetings on Wednesday. In his internal memo to staffers, first picked-up by PaidCotent (in-full below), Miller noted that Van Natta was “stepping down,” while praising the efforts of Jones and Hirschhorn.
He did however, give some credit to Van Natta for a slight revival for MySpace, noting “We added over 1.5 million users and grew significantly in time spent last month – as a result of many of his efforts.”
So why the abrupt exit if they were headed in the right direction? One obvious reason is that Rupert Murdoch is still not happy where MySpace is. He publicly noted in a recent earnings call that “It’s (MySpace) not where we want it.” During that same call, the company highlighted that its digital media group dropped $32 million from a year earlier – largely due to marketers moving away from MySpace and into Facebook. But what can they do with it at this point?
The new team’s vision appeared to be focused on music and gaming. MySpace still has the in into Hollywood and New York. But with shrinking traffic, can they build subscription services into the mix? There have been rumors about a music subscription service but nothing has been announced publicly. Without that, the site appears to be a niche site that won’t be a revenue maker for the company. Could they on-load it? Maybe a Russian investor like Digital Sky Technologies (investor in Facebook) would be interested speculate media insiders, but I’m not sure what other appetite is out there for MySpace in its current state.
But perhaps the bigger question is where will Van Natta end up? Perhaps, Twitter?
Today we announced that Owen Van Natta is stepping down as MySpace’s CEO. Mike Jones and Jason Hirschhorn, who have each done a great job from both an operational and product perspective, are being elevated to co-Presidents and will assume Owen’s responsibilities. While this may be a surprising turn of events for some of you, I am absolutely confident that this change is best for all parties involved and – most importantly – the MySpace business. Owen took on an incredible challenge in assuming leadership of MySpace during a difficult period. He has worked to refocus and revitalize the company, and I believe MySpace is pointed in the right direction and gaining valuable momentum – we added over 1.5 million users and grew significantly in time spent last month – as a result of many of his efforts. However, in discussing with Owen his priorities for the future both personally and professionally, we both agreed that it was best that he step down at this time. I am grateful to Owen for his hard work, and I ask that you join me in wishing him well in the future. His departure is effective immediately, as are the appointments of both Mike and Jason.
I will leave it to Mike and Jason to communicate to all of you their excitement about the future and their priorities for the business going forward, but I would like to express my confidence in their ability to lead MySpace into this new and promising chapter. Since joining in April, their efforts on both the operational and product development fronts have been vital to our recent progress.
Thank you all for your continued hard work, and please join me in congratulating Mike and Jason on their new roles, and in wishing Owen all the best in the future.
Best,
Jon
Office of Jonathan Miller
Chairman & CEO, News Corp. Digital Media Group
Chief Digital Officer, News Corporation
Over the past few months Racetalk has discussed the ways Senators John McCain and Barack Obama have used social media to get their messages out, – read here, here and here. Today, Reuters announced that Barack Obama is once again using a new medium to reach voters – this time through online video gaming.
While advertising in games has been popular for a few years now, Obama is the first Presidential candidate to buy ad space in video games. Obama is using the Internet ads to target specific voters – 18-34 year-old males who are hard to reach through traditional advertising because they spend less time watching TV and reading. The in-game banners and billboards will be used to help expand the reach of VoteforChange.com so that more people can register to vote, obtain absentee voter information or find an early voting location.
According to the article, Obama’s advertising will be featured in 18 popular online games through the Xbox Live service including “Guitar Hero 3“, “NBA Live 08” and “NFL Tour” and are targeted to 10 key battleground states where early voting is available. The ads will be targeted at gamers in particular geographical areas though the IP addresses registered with their Internet service provider when they log on to Xbox Live.
No word was mentioned on how much Obama spent on the ads, and it remains to be seen whether the ads will be effective, but it’s clear that Obama has his pulse on how to reach young voters, and that’s something that McCain still struggles with.
Ah, the Internet. I never managed to turn this around for yesterday, so who’s stopping me from putting it out today? Why wait a week? If only the Philadelphia Inquirer understood that.
In the spirit of the Olympics, an event that not only transcends sport but also the very meaning of competition (Bob Costas is rubbing off on me), it seems appropriate to spotlight the media industry competition that has become a pseudo Shakespearean subplot to the Beijing games.
A wiser man passed along this week that Herbert Hoover once said, “Competition is not only the basis of protection to the consumer, but is the incentive to progress.”
It’s hard to argue against the fact that competition in the technology and media sectors has changed the way the Beijing Games are being covered; leading to a progressive viewing experience that seems to be sitting well with viewers.
“NBC’s decision to delay broadcasting the opening ceremonies by 12 hours sent people across the country to their computers to poke holes in NBC’s technological wall — by finding newsfeeds on foreign broadcasters’ Web sites and by watching clips of the ceremonies on YouTube and other sites. In response, NBC sent frantic requests to Web sites, asking them to take down the illicit clips and restrict authorized video to host countries. As the four-hour ceremony progressed, a game of digital whack-a-mole took place. Network executives tried to regulate leaks on the Web and shut down unauthorized video, while viewers deftly traded new links on blogs and on the Twitter site, redirecting one another to coverage from, say, Germany, or a site with a grainy Spanish-language video stream.”
NBC, obviously concerned that breach could tarnish viewership for its primetime broadcast and alienate advertisers, may have uncovered something about the new media landscape along the way. Early results, including the numbers for the opening ceremony – 34.2 million viewers – indicate that this year’s games are drawing more viewers in the states for an internationally hosted Olympics then ever before. David Carr nicely summed this up in his Media Equation column yesterday:
“You might assume, along with NBC executives, that the jail break of information damaged NBC’s precious choreographed broadcast. You would assume wrongly, by the way. According to Richard Sandomir of The New York Times, the four-hour opening ceremony attracted an average of 34.2 million viewers, the most ever for an opening ceremony not in the United States. I was one of them, in part because as the day wore on, I saw all manner of oohing and ahhing on the Web from bloggers and friends who had peeked in and found themselves awe-struck. By the time the broadcast rolled around, my daughter and I had been nicely primed by the Web fanatics for what was, after all, a kind of epic movie made in real time that was best enjoyed on a big screen with good resolution.”
His insight, underlines another way in which technological competition has transformed the way we watch this Olympics. For me and many others the Beijing games will likely be remembered as the first HD games. For the Torino Olympics NBC produced 50 percent of the events in HD. This year, for the first time, the Olympics are being produced entirely in HD. For borderline Olympic watchers (like me) this makes a huge difference. In Boston, Comcast has dedicated HD Olympic channels that broadcast basketball and soccer 24 hours a day in HD. This weekend, I found myself cultivated by the Brazil vs. New Zealand soccer game in HD and ended up sitting through the Ivory Coast vs. Serbia game after that – only because it was in HD.
Fox Business vs. CNBC: Leave it to Fox Business to create a negative ad campaign around Olympics’ coverage. The somewhat seedy network has bought local airtime to run commercials on CNBC, during their switch-over blocks to Olympic programming, which call out CNBC for dropping its business coverage. Phil Rosenthal of the Chicago Tribunereports that they have bought airtime in local markets including Chicago and New York.
He also reports that commercials go something like this:
“In just a couple of minutes, CNBC is going to drop their business news programming,” the Fox anchor Liz Claman says in commercials that will run on CNBC in Chicago, New York, and other major markets beginning today. “Switch to the Fox Business Network,” she says. “Real business news and no games!”
I have to admit, it’s hard to take your eyes off of Fox Business. Kind of like it’s hard to take your eyes off a train wreck.
Wall Street Journal Vs. Washington Post: Ron Grover, BusinessWeek’s venerable LA Bureau chief became the latest to weigh in on Rupert’s charge to take down the New York Times last week. What got Don to finally address the issue? Here’s what:
“The day after General Motors announced a stunning $15.5 billion quarterly loss, the Journal which Murdoch has controlled for a year, led instead with the more tantalizing story of a federal scientist’s suicide while under investigation in the anthrax case.”
Today’s Journal, interestingly enough, leads with the Georgia and Russia conflict. It also includes a separate page 1 story that analyzes how Vladimir Putin has drawn a line in the sand for the West. Murdoch’s Journal has made political and world news a leading priority in recent months. Even back in late March, Washington Post columnist Howard Kurtz detailed how the Journal was making political coverage its business.The percentage of political coverage on the front page of the Journal in the first four months – following Murdoch’s takeover – versus the four months previous to his takeover, jumped from 4.8 to 18 percent.
However, a funny thing has happened along the way as Murdoch continues to set his aim at the New York Times – the subplot with the Washington Post has become more interesting. It’s no secret that Murdoch had a heavy hand in showing Marcus Brauchli the door and now he’s competing as editor-in-chief at the Post in breaking poltical coverage. With Brauchli working closely with Washington Post publisher, and newly anointed media mogul Katharine Graham, it must’ve been a little chilly at this party in Beijing. Here’s hoping they didn’t cross paths.
If you ever have the opportunity to meet Chris DeWolfe, Founder and CEO of MySpace, in person; it’s likely you’ll come away from the meeting with the word charisma on the tip of your tongue. Watching DeWolfe work the patio Tuesday night at Fortune Brainstorm: TECH’s private dinner overlooking the Pacific, you could easily mistake him with a rock star.
In fact, watching DeWolfe get flocked too; I couldn’t help but think about what polar opposites he and Mark Zuckerberg, CEO of Facebook, are.
DeWolfe continued his rock star ways on Wednesday at Brainstorm: TECH by announcing a new music service that will launch on MySpace in September. In an interview with Fortune’s Adam Lashinksy, DeWolfe discussed the new service which will allow users to listen to free streaming music, purchase song downloads, ringtones and even concert tickets.
“MySpace will be the center of each artists’ universe,” noted DeWolfe.
DeWolfe was quick to discuss that music is already a huge part of the MySpace offering. He stated that 5 billion songs are being played every month and 65 percent of users have a music song or video embedded on their profiles.
When asked by audience members to discuss his thoughts on Facebook, DeWolfe used the further foray into music to describe the diferences between the two often-compared companies.
“Sure we have to look at all our competitors in the 25 countries that we are in. I think they are more of a uitility that makes it efficient to communicate back and forth. I think they’d agree with that assesment. We think we do the same thing but MySpace is more about self expression and letting the users create their own exeprience. This is why we are investing so heavily in music. Music and self expression are so intertwined.”
John Huey, Editor-In-Chief of TIME Inc. just wrapped-up Fortune Brainstorm: TECH by chatting with Neil Young (yes that Neil Young). Here are some excerpts, from the first part of their chat on music quality:
John Huey: We have 25 minutes to vet this treasure trove, so we’ll try do our best. He just said to me before we came out here that you have to watch what you say because it will stick with you for 20 years. I often say that rust doesn’t sleep; which is the only way to edit and I think the two tie together nicely.
Neil hasn’t disappeared. He’s been around a lot lately with his movies and he also recently wrote a song with the subtle title “Let’s Impeach the President.” I ran across this anecdote about him that I thought you would find interesting.
I have a friend that works at West Point and each year they have a artist perform for the graduating cadets. They ask the performer if they would be wiling to wave their fee for the young men going into service for their country. The only person ever to wave his fee was Neil Young. Go figure a left wing, Canadian rock star was the only one to wave their fee. Neil was kind of embarrassed when I brought this up to him and said no one is supposed to know this.
OK, let’s talk about the industry that brought you here. In the area of music. No industry has been more disrupted by technology then music. You, unlike anyone else, have been working for 15 years on an alternative digital platform. You were upset with the quality of CD’s for sometime and your feeling is that it has gotten worse from there?
Neil Young:It went downhill from there. I loved the CD when it came out. It was great for music to go to that little disk and it was very convenient. But that same convenience has been taken advantage of. Apple especially, has taken that convenience to an extreme and ignored quality. Quality is not there. I’m trying to figure out a way. Especially a play in the PC Market. I think PC makers can overlook the area of quality music on PC’s. PC hardware should include software to listen to higher resolution music. So we are not stuck with the Apple or MP3 standard. A model for a company that provides hi-res song listening is something that I am certainly pursuing.
The problem with all of this is there is no way to play back music at the resolution that it was created at. It will only play back in CD quality. This sounds a lot better then MP3 but it is not hi-res. That is not what we are capable of. It seems like the ability to listen to hi-res music is one of the missing elements in consumer technology. Any designer of PC’s that I can talk to, I will be pushing for that.
I record now in a way that can be bumped in an even higher-res. I always record at the highest-res of digital I can. We are getting better and better at recording but the quality is not there in playback.
JH: Do they believe the consumer can be lead there?
NY:I’ve never heard the quality of music mentioned. That is what made music so great. If you bought music that you could see, it would be like watching the lowest-res movie. Because you can’t view it, you can’t see that it’s lower then what it could be. The content is important but at the expense of quality; that is too big of a price to pay. Especially for me and my peers that try to create music that will last forever.
JH: Have you discussed with Apple and Steve Jobs?
NY: I’ve discussed this with Michael Dell who is checking with his folks to see what they can do.
What do you think? Do you want higer-res music that sounds live? As we’ve learned this week at Brainstorm: Tech the industry is certainly open to your ideas. Including Michael Dell.
“Broadcasting is really too important to be left to the broadcasters”. So said Tony Benn, Member of Parliament, to constituents in 1968. That same year, the Free Communications Group (FCG) was founded to demand “democratic control of all media”.
Lets skip the next forty years’ analysis of broadcasting motives and actions that so preoccupied these politicians, broadcasters and journalists. In 2008, convergence has emerged as a force of nature, irrevocably changing “broadcasting” globally, and the FCG might just be smiling if it still existed.
I put “broadcasting” in quote marks because I decided, as chair, to start last Thursday’s Convergence Conversation, titled “Is broadcasting dead or merely taking a break?“, by seeking to define broadcasting. Not as trivial a task as it sounds, rather a critical task if the 65 conversationists who attended the event hosted by BT Media at BT Tower were going to reach a conclusion.
The meaning of broadcast
The Oxford English Dictionary defines the verb “broadcast” as “transmit by radio or television”, and “tell to many people”. And for American English speakers Merriam-Webster offers “to make widely known” and “to transmit or make public by means of radio or television”.
So the same word applies to both the technology employed and the end result; the “radio or television” transmission, and the one-to-many communication achieved. I guess this attribution of dual meaning is to be expected given that “radio or television” technology was the only way to communicate one-to-many for almost the entire twentieth century. This technology consisted RF transmission from the 1920s and cable from the 1940s.
The broadcast industry supply chain
This isn’t an academic paper, so we can simplify the (commercial) broadcast industry supply chain as one that aggregates audiences with content that informs, entertains and educates so that they can also be hit with adverts. The advertising revenue should cover all costs with a bit left over; the profit. So the chain goes something like:
1. Produce or commission great content
2. Estimate how many people will watch it
3. Sell ads to go alongside the content
4. Transmit the content and ads
5. Grow the audience and repeat
The disruption of the broadcast industry
Convergence has wrought huge change on the broadcasting industry.
Traditional broadcasting technologies are no longer the sole means of achieving one-to-many communication, and they struggle with any form of many-to-many communication. Mobile and Internet protocol based technologies are the new contenders.
The broadcasters’ revenues pivot almost entirely on marketing directors’ willingness to pay to advertise on TV and radio. Yet new technology allows viewers to skip broadcast ads and has created competing new opportunities (eg, the Web and mobile) for marketers to reach out to their target audience. In other words, new channels are purported to offer comparatively more effective and more measurable marketing outreach, so there is fierce competition for the marketing budget that has underpinned the broadcasting industry to date.
Will broadcasters survive?
As for all dynamic systems, the answer to this question hinges on the relative rate of change of the core characteristics and parameters in the mix. To reduce it to the simplest form:
If the rate at which advertising spend is diverted away from traditional commercial broadcasting exceeds the rate at which traditional broadcasters can adapt and capture some of the new kinds of marketing spend, they’re dead (or require some serious bridging capital).
The adaptation required can be considered to fall into two camps. Firstly, there’s the “OMG! We better get monetising the new channels quickly!”; and secondly, there’s the “What can we do the new channels can’t do, and how can we leverage this differentiation?”
The first of these, getting into the new channels quickly, is exemplified by traditional broadcasters’ uptake of new technology and media. The award winning bbc.co.uk and iPlayer. Time Warner’s award winning cnn.com. BSkyB’s Sky+ box.
And Jon Mobbs, BT Media Head of Strategy, clearly articulated at our event when traditional broadcasting wins hands down. No other technology is as efficient at reaching hundreds of thousands of people as traditional broadcasting. No other technology is as adept at covering live events. And none of the new technologies can yet warrant the same quality of service.
Fragmentation
It appears very unlikely now that any broadcaster from the twentieth century can thrive unevolved. Moreover, no one organisation can own the entire supply chain. They may offer services throughout the supply chain, but the chain fragments, shifts platform, shifts place and gets mashed-up.
The user (aka the recipient of news and information, the listener, the viewer, the inter-actor) has been empowered to set the schedule. It’s what they want, when they want it and how they want it. Video on demand. Personal video recorders (PVR). Newsfeeds (RSS). Alerts. Lifestreaming. Podcasts. Web radio. Mobile TV.
To all intents and purposes, we’re just a short hop away from everyone having their own customised channel, a channel tailored uniquely from your own subscriptions, your friends’ subscriptions and recommendations, and automated “if you like that, you’ll like this” discovery.
Given that broadcasters’ revenues lay in the hands of marketing directors, it’s worth understanding what myChannel means to them:
Considerably more fragmentation of the target audience of communications campaigns
Less precise timing of delivery
Increased opportunity to provide niche information
Less certainty of how each recipient is receiving the information
Greater opportunity for innovation in inviting and securing interaction
The need for new mechanisms for gauging campaign success.
The broadcaster as brand
Attempting now to leap swiftly from analysis to synthesis, it appears there may be an ever increasing emphasis on broadcasters’ abilities to transmute into lifestyle brands.
They need to pick their fight (the parts of the supply chain they wish to excel at) and their audience (who’s going to buy into their brand). Both the supply chain and the audience are too diverse and too complex for a broadcaster to try to be all things to all people, and too noisy not to aspire to reaping the benefits of lifestyle branding.
What tech?
And, if this isn’t sitting on the fence, the right broadcasting technology will simply be defined as the right one at the right time.
Live Earth concert = traditional broadcasting tech. Live Earth’s ongoing SOS campaign = Web and mobile.
First airing of Lost = traditional broadcasting tech. Subsequent episode sales and associated community engagement = traditional, Web and mobile.
Democratisation
According to the Free Communications Group, “newspaper, television and radio should be under the control of all people who produce them.”
Whilst this point of view was asserted in the 1960s to eradicate Government politicking of the BBC, the assertion repeated in 2008 takes on new meaning and fresh energy. The viewer has always been able to vote with the off button, or by switching channels. Now they can engage in programming, vote for winners of talent shows, develop and vote for plot ideas, and even create and publish their own content.
In conclusion, broadcasters must be adaptable and nimble. They must develop compelling content and services, create enticing opportunties for engagement, and adopt the right channels at the right time. No small task, but as the next Desperate Housewives or X-Factor won’t be user-generated content (a small matter of budget), there’s plenty of opportunity for today’s broadcasters to thrive tomorrow.
I met Ronnie Wood this week. He sat down next to me in a bar and bought me a drink. That ranks him in my book as a very nice chap. And I got a 90 minute window into living life as a globally famous rock star, an insight that confirmed my relief, as if the situation could be otherwise, that I’m not a ‘celebrity’…
“Is that Ronnie Wood? Ronnie Wood? Rolling Stones? Ronnie Wood?”
“I don’t believe it… is that really you? We’re big fans of……”
“I’ve got all your albums.”
“Could I have your autograph and a picture with you?”
“I don’t believe it, is it really you?”
Although Ronnie has had four decades to come up with witty ripostes, I particularly liked his response to the last one… “Actually, I only came fifth in a Ronnie Wood lookalike competition.” From what I saw, he has a lovely way in dealing with the countless people that approach him; what the rest of us would call invading our space.
We got talking about my line of work having danced through the ages of music technology, from the vinyl and 8-track of the mid-60s, through compact cassette and CD to mp3. Not unexpectedly, Ronnie mourns the passing of the physical format, but loves the idea that music has returned to the 60s notion that it’s all about the music, having been distracted in between times by the huge music marketing machine. The 80s and 90s were all about shifting massive volumes of records and CDs, and gigging was just a distraction.
Once our conversation arrived at the digital age, it turned inevitably to the mobile phone / mobile infotainment device. And Ronnie loves his phone. “F***ing brilliant” to quote him verbatim. So I thought I’d charge his enthusiasm by talking about the latest innovations, and particularly location based services. Interestingly, it had the opposite effect.
I guess of everyone I’ve spoken with about the opportunities, convenience and dangers of location based services, Ronnie Wood is the best placed of them all to understand what personal privacy truly means. He showed his disgust for the ideas I presented by shoving his phone away from him down the bar. Not quite the phone smashing violent remonstration you might stereotypically expect from a rock star, but demonstrable revulsion nevertheless.
Technologists, marketers and society in general have some interesting and controversial choices to make right now. Location based services, and other privacy and technically related innovations such as identify cards, face recognition, RFID tagging and extensive customer / citizen profiling, impact the dynamics and may reshape the foundations of our society.
If you’re interested in these aspects of the digital world, and the commercial and fun aspects to, join me at Being Digital in London this June 10th. I’ll be speaking on the Location panel.
Wikipedia informs me that The Rolling Stones penned “Get off of my cloud” as a reaction to their sudden popularity following the success of “(I can’t get no) Satisfaction”. Following Ronnie’s dissatisfaction with the possibilities of location based services, could we be listening to “Get off of my phone” anytime soon?
I’m at RIPE56 today and tomorrow. RIPE (Réseaux IP Européens) is a collaborative forum open to all parties interested in wide area IP networks in Europe and beyond, and RIPE56 is, you’ve guess it, the 56th meeting.
This week-long event brings together the best minds on IP networks, and I’m here working predominantly on the issues of IPv4 depletion and IPv6 uptake. This is a complex issue requiring some deft communications.
Right now however, I’m in a very interesting presentation by Thomas Billeter and Fredy Kuenzler of Zattoo. From their website:
“Zattoo has developed a software program that allows you to watch TV on your computer. All you need is a broadband connection and a current operating system (Windows XP or Vista, Mac OS X, or Linux). The service is legal and free of charge.
“Zattoo is a peer-to-peer application. This means that the data is not streamed from one central server to all users watching a certain program, but flows from one user to the next, thus also using the computing power of the users’ computers.”
Employing a team of 50 and funding of $15m, Zattoo is already live in Belgium, Denmark, France, Germany, Norway, Spain, Switzerland and the UK. More European countries and the US are planned this year.
Of course, the business plan is underpinned by advertising revenues, although the possibility of subscription based services isn’t dismissed at this stage. The pitch to broadcasters and advertisers: “Zattoo attracts fleeing viewers back to broadcast TV“.
The guys have just shown a matrix with “clips” and “full 24/7 programming” along one axis, and “archive content” and “live content” along the other. Here’s how they slot themselves and competitive video offerings in that matrix:
Zattoo currently serves two million users with 500 servers in 16 locations. Another 200 servers will be added in a few weeks. Less than half of content delivery is managed peer-to-peer due to the upload bandwidth constraints of typical ADSL broadband connections.
Their research has revealed why their current userbase is attracted to Zattoo:
29% want to watch whilst they do other stuff on their computer
22% don’t have a TV
18% use it when they are away from their normal TV
14% use it when their normal TV is being used by someone else
On last night’s episode of CSI: NY, a new type of technology from Microsoft helped investigators virtually reconstruct a crime scene by uploading hundreds of camera phone thumbnail photos that were taken in the area.
USA Today reported that this was done by using Microsoft’s Photosynth, which is still in development. The technology takes a large collection of photos of a place or an object, analyzes them for similarities, and displays the photos in a reconstructed three-dimensional space.
With many people recording their favorite shows and fast-forwarding through the commercials, product placement has become an important and effective way for companies to get in front of consumers. According to a recent study by the PQ Media research firm, product placement grew 33.7 percent in 2007, to $2.9 billion. However, not all product placements are paid opportunities. For Microsoft and CSI, they have an ‘ongoing creative relationship’ where both parties can benefit.
Last year 30 Rock dedicated an episode to product placement (see segment below), where television writer Liz Lemon argued against including GE’s products in the show:
Liz: “We’re not compromising the integrity of the show to sell…”
Pete: “Wow, this is diet Snapple?”
Liz: “I know, it tastes just like regular Snapple, doesn’t it?”
Frank: “You should try plumagranite, it’s amazing.”
Cerie: “I only date guys who drink Snapple.”
Jack: “Yes, everyone loves Snapple. Lord knows I do.”
The show even featured someone dressed in a Snapple suit asking where HR was located.
Racepoint has has some experience with product placement, such as when the CereTom, a portable CT scanner, was featured in ER’s 300th episode this season. The scanner also made appearances on Grey’s Anatomy, and TLC’s Diagnosis X.
Last week, Segway launched a social network – Segway Social. This decision was made following a recent survey, in which 82 percent of users said they wanted to connect with other Segway customers. In this Web 2.0 community, people can share tips, inform fellow members about their personal experiences using a Segway personal transporter (PT), locate a “glide” (fun route to use a PT) in their area, and find out how much money they are saving by going green and riding the Segway wave.
This is a perfect example of the ways that companies are gradually adopting social media in order to improve customer satisfaction, allow users to establish a sense of connection with the brand, engage with new audiences, and drive sales. What was once merely a tool for security guards and police officers on patrol is now evolving into the “new bike” for eco-enthusiasts and commuters alike, through the power of peer-to-peer marketing.
What’s more is Segway’s strategy for promoting their company messaging and green goals through their blog. Segway is establishing itself as a thought leader in the green transportation industry by getting involved in the ongoing conversation and commenting on news, trends and events such as Earth Day.
What will be interesting to see is whether these social media marketing tactics prove fruitful and drive sales, as each basic PT runs at a cool $5100 or more. Although social networks like Social Segway are doing a great job demonstrating that it’s worth the green to go green, the ever-rising price of gas pretty much speaks for itself. I’d say PTs are A-OK.
